The Sun at Midday: Tales of a Mediterranean Family

This astonishing memoir is the story of a family who always felt slightly foreign in every country and developed a chameleon-like ability to adapt to their surroundings. Gini Alhadeff was born in Alexandria, Egypt, and grew up in Cairo, Khartoum, Florence, and Tokyo. With a vivid gift for narrative, Alhadeff evokes the languid Alexandria of the early decades of this century (where her mother’s family made its fortune in cotton) and some of its beguiling honorary citizens: a violet-eyed aunt who refused to have new slipcovers made for her sofa so President Nasser would find the old ones when her house was impounded; a cousin who was taught the limits of reason by Wittgenstein at Cambridge and became a monsignor; a gynecologist uncle interned at Auschwitz and then Buchenwald, who lived to tell his tale with stark unsentimentality. With a keen sense for both the comic and the tragic, Alhadeff sizes up what is left of the family fortune: a tendency to live beyond one’s means, the stories and legends that survive the rise and fall of families, and the present as a paradise for those who, having lost all, have nothing to lose.

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About the author

Gini Alhadeff was born in Alexandria, Egypt, of Italian parents. After attending a French kindergarten in Khartoum, Alhadeff learned English in Tokyo, graduated from high school in Florence, Italy, and from art schools in London and New York. She is the author of a memoir, The Sun at Midday: Tales of a Mediterranean Family, and of a novel, Diary of a Djinn. She founded and edited two literary quarterlies, Normal, and XXIst Century! in the late 80's, and has since contributed regularly to Italian Elle, and to Travel + Leisure magazine; more recently also to the quarterlies Bidoun, The Drawbridge and to T Magazine. In 2004 she won Mexico's Pluma de Plata award for journalism. She edited and translated the first American anthology of Italian poet Patrizia Cavalli, My Poems Won’t Change the World (FSG 2013) and her translation of Fleur Jaeggy’s collection of stories, I Am the Brother of XX, will be published by New Directions in 2017.

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